


Snowblind

by pallidiflora



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, Emotional Manipulation, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-27
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2018-01-06 07:50:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1104289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallidiflora/pseuds/pallidiflora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He tries his best to dislike Hans, though it's difficult and, he knows, ultimately futile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snowblind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [forparadise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/forparadise/gifts).



> ELOQUENCE, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white. - The Devil's Dictionary

By the time Kristoff returns to the castle it's too late. That's how Hans puts it, who is sitting at the foot of the grand staircase, head hanging, elbows on his knees. _You're a friend of Anna's, aren't you? It's too late. I tried to save her, but she... I'm sorry._ Kristoff says _what do you mean_ , but Hans only motions for him to follow and starts up the stairs, boots hushed by the carpet. Kristoff would like to punch him, he thinks: his somber face, his doleful translucent eyes, water under ice.  
  
Hans leads him into a cavernous, painting-lined room, mostly dark, silent except for the ponderous ticking of a grandfather clock. Anna's body—if it can still be called that, dispossessed of flesh—has been placed on a couch against a far wall, where it _(she)_ commands all the presence of a statue. She lies face-up, arms crossed over her chest, hands clasped; she has the look of the painted saints Kristoff has seen in folk churches: tranquil, prim, immobile. Nothing like herself.  
  
"There was nothing anyone could do," Hans says. "This won't go unpunished, though. Her sister—" Kristoff shoves him away.  
  
They hold her funeral in one of those such churches, less grander than the ones he recalls though still mute and stuffy. Her body, a flickering shadowed orange in the light of the single fire they've huddled around, has been laid out on a cloth-draped table; the cloth, probably found in the back of a linen closet, is embroidered with delicate flowers which he can just make out in the dim light: tiny clusters of pink yarrow, round cheerful buttercups. He only knows these flowers for what they can do—boil yarrow with cream to make an ointment. Apply a poultice of buttercup to the stomach as a counterirritant. What good does any of that do her? There is no singing, no white carnations. Hans, shivering with his bevy of marooned dignitaries in the front bench, glances at him now and again with his irritating, sad-eyed expression.  
  
After the short service the attendees disperse, seeking warmth, muttering about the future. Kristoff shoulders his way to the altar, where Hans is standing with his back to him. _One last look_ , he's thinking, though he certainly hopes it's not. What will be done with her? She looks so fragile: shatterable, meltable, vulnerable to all manner of indignities.  
  
"What about a coffin?" Kristoff says to Hans's rigid back.  
  
"We need all the firewood we can get, I'm afraid. Perhaps a marble one, in time." He says this mournfully, but also with a kind of chilly practicality Kristoff hadn't expected of him, with his orderly white exterior, rounded and uniform like the sugar-dusted Christmas cookies he remembers eating as a child. Despite himself, he respects this.  
  
"I could use a few more hands around the castle, if you'd be willing to stay."  
  
"I don't..." The thought of being cooped up in this castle, with its muffling baroque wallpapers, its stateliness, its looming afterimages, makes his skin itch.  
  
"Please," Hans says. Places a hand on his shoulder. Kristoff neither acknowledges or rejects this gesture. "I think it's what Anna would have wanted."  


* * *

  
Kristoff is put to work chopping firewood, hunting ptarmigans and moose, plucking and skinning them, hauling snow back and forth. Exhausting, hearty work which requires no forethought or afterthought. He sleeps, curled against Sven's side, in the castle's servants' quarters, five or so people to a room; the first night he plays his lute to keep his fingers warm, which proves to be a mistake when grubby children start climbing on him, making requests.  
  
He tries his best to dislike Hans, though it's difficult and, he knows, ultimately futile. When he comes in from the cold he declines Hans's proffered cups of hot _gløgg_ , scavenged from the castle's wine cellars and served in mismatched glasses stamped with the Arendelle crest; he refuses offers to eat with him and all the other visiting bluebloods in the upper rooms, instead huddling with the rest of the peasants in the ballroom, gnawing on bones; he even rejects the warmer furs and sturdier boots Hans's men press on him. He knows he's being churlish, childish really, but hopes that if he behaves like a barbarian long enough it will offend Hans's sensibilities and he'll be left alone.  
  
A week or so passes and Hans persists, handing him a scratchy, fringed plaid blanket when he steps into the entryway, nose and fingers numb, back aching from hacking down snow-heavy trees; finally Kristoff takes it, wrapping it around his shoulders like an old beggar woman.  
  
"Shall I have one of my men sharpen your axe for you?" Hans says, holding out his hand, safely encased in its white glove. Come to think of it, Kristoff has never seen his hands. He pictures them as soft, manicured, the neutral pink-white of cooked pork.  
  
"Don't you have anything better to do?"  
  
"Oh, plenty," Hans says, and places his fingers around Kristoff's axe, which he hands over without resistance.  


* * *

  
It gets colder by the day, cold enough that no one ventures outside without necessity. They boil snow in tin cups over the sparse fires which are built indoors, scorching the ceilings and filling the rooms with smoke; the food supplies dwindle as they dip into the castle's stock of pickled herring and shrunken, sandy rutabagas; fingers and toes are lost here and there, minor in the grand scheme of things. After some protest, Hans has Kristoff installed in one of the upper rooms, _since you've done so much_ ; it was once a guest room, and he, after all, is a guest. It smells of cooped-up linens, and is too large.  
  
Some days there is nothing to do but wander, a pursuit Kristoff normally enjoys when not confined to long, lightless corridors, the windows oblongs of solid white. On one of these days he ambles through the upstairs, jogging sometimes to keep warm, blowing into his cupped hands; he spends awhile examining royal family busts and, marginally more interesting, suits of armour furred with ice. He makes his way to the east wing, where the opulent, empty bedrooms are, occupied now by the nobles; there is the family's dining room, too, where he has now consented to join Hans at mealtimes, and a study. The doors of the dining room have been thrown open, sending voices and yellow light into the hallway; he enters to find Hans and some of his men clustered around a fire. The tasselled curtains, the bronze candlesticks and the china plates littered with bones and smears of preserves: these have been left alone. Carved chairs, though, a sideboard and a mantle clock: these are being taken apart, thrown on the fire or tossed in a pile.  
  
"What are you _doing?_ " Kristoff rescues the leg of a chair from a soldier, and, brandishing it like a club, he stalks toward Hans, hulking, shoulders rounded, looking vaguely bear-like. "This... this doesn't belong to you!"  
  
"Your Majesty—" The soldier makes a grab at Kristoff, but Hans waves him away.  
  
"We need more firewood," he says. "It's getting too dangerous to go outside." He begins to pace as Kristoff watches. "Something needs to be done. I shouldn't have let it continue this long, it's my fault."  
  
"What are you saying?"  
  
"Elsa is responsible for Anna's..." He breaks off, too distraught to continue, and instead gazes into the fire, bigger now than before. One of the castle hands throws a painting on it, frame and all: muted pastel faces, plumed hats, suggestive round edges of fruits, everything crackles, blackens, flakes into ash. His eyes are huge, the whites opaque, glazed.  
  
"Something needs to be done," he says again. He's standing close enough that Kristoff can smell, faintly, the smell of lemon coming from inside his clothes, where his skin must be shivery and clean. A starched scent.  


* * *

  
In the evening they discover Elsa has escaped, leaving only a pile of rubble and a pair of iced-over manacles. Hans retires to his room early, a room that once was Anna's; Kristoff had allowed himself to look into it once, when no one else was around: done in pinkish tones, sparse, stately. Not something she would have chosen for herself, he thinks. After dinner—consisting of a few pale carrots and some cured lamb, eaten dourly off his knees at the edge of his bed—he decides to visit him. The double doors to his room are slightly ajar, and Kristoff nudges them open to find a fire burning in the fireplace, Hans silhouetted against the window.  
  
"Oh," he says, and smiles, pushes away. "I didn't expect you to visit me here."  
  
"Yeah, well, y'know." After a pause he sits on the edge of the girlish, cake-like bed, which has been made and looks uninhabited. Hans sits next to him, chin propped on his fist, a statuesque sort of pose reserved for royal portraits. "What are you gonna do?"  
  
"We'll have to send out a search party," he says, "to look for her."  
  
"To kill her, you mean."  
  
"You know I don't want to." He says this innocently, reproachfully. Saint Hans, with his hands clasped behind his back; butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. "It has to be done. Can I count on you to lead the charge?"  
  
"Me?" Kristoff laughs. "Why me?"  
  
"You know the mountains better than anyone, or so I've been told. You're the most capable."  
  
"I don't really think—"  
  
"Don't be modest," Hans says, and places a genteel hand on the crook of his elbow, as if he's about to lead him in a dance. He's not wearing his gloves; his hands are broad, with large knuckles and neat, square fingernails. "You've been so much help."  
  
In this light his uncanny, pale-green eyes are leached of colour. Hans is gazing at him, mouth slightly ajar and showing off his even white teeth, the sight of which is somehow indecent, sexual. He blinks slowly, and Kristoff has to look away, compose himself.  
  
"I'll, um, think about it." He extricates himself. "I should go."  


* * *

  
He spends most of the next day absorbed in work. Planning routes, gathering supplies—lengths of rope, waterskins, pickaxes; he shoes and feeds the cavalry's horses, helps to pack rations of flatbread and cheeses. According to the clock—functional, undecorated, as befitting a guest room—it's only just past six, however he wants to lie on this bed, which is not his and has a leftover smell of lye soap, and not move. In fact he does this for an hour or so, head pillowed on his arms, staring up at the ceiling: plain white, with no moulding. When the fire in the grate has burned low and the room is growing chilly there is a knock at the door, and a voice says, "may I come in?" Unfailingly polite.  
  
"Sure," Kristoff says, not raising his head. Hans enters with a wooden tray, which he sets down on the bedside table: a bowl of stew, two glasses of beer.  
  
"What's all this?"  
  
"I thought maybe you hadn't eaten dinner," Hans says. "I had one of the cooks scrounge around for something. It's not much, but..."  
  
"Are you kidding? I haven't had hot food in—I don't know _how_ long..."  
  
Hans is right: really the stew isn't much, watery, made with dried-up old potatoes and preserved ham, but he eats it with undisguised pleasure, holding the bowl under his chin and wolfing. Hans, who has drawn up one of the guest room's plain, straight-backed chairs beside the bed, watches him intently, a look he'd call calculating if he didn't know better. Hans drinks his beer in polite sips, while Kristoff downs half his glass in one gulp, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.  
  
"I'm glad you liked it," Hans says, smiling. He places his beer, a quarter drunk, on the nightstand, and sits next to Kristoff on the bed, close enough that, if he wanted to, Kristoff could make their knees touch. "I just wanted to thank you. At first I had the impression that... well, you didn't like me very much."  
  
"No, I—" But he doesn't know how to finish that sentence. _I'm a boor with no manners,_ maybe. Hans looks up at him, smiling a half-smile, then down to his hand which rests, slack and overlarge, on the bedspread between them. It feels like a mitten, not flesh but wool or fur.  
  
"That would be a shame, if it were true," Hans continues. Shifts so that the heat from one thigh and shoulder radiates out, subtle but potent as a cloud of pheromones. (Is this all he's capable of thinking about? Mating season, mammalian breeding as in reindeer?)  
  
"Could I—"  
  
Hans kisses him—soft, dry, no saliva, only a faint malty whiff of beer lingering around his closed mouth. Decorous; the kind of kiss reserved for the backs of hands. "I'm sorry," he says, hot breath against Kristoff's cheek, but Kristoff pulls him back in, kissing him again, clumsily, fumbling. Hans presses a hand against his chest as if to stop him, and then says _yes, yes_.  
  
His skin is as clean as he'd imagined it to be, _pure as the driven snow_ as the saying goes. Kristoff can envision just that: Hans bathing in snow, scrubbing at himself with pumice until he's rubbed pink and raw. The thought of Hans performing this sort of convivial, virtuous ritual is, in this moment, potently erotic; he would like to dishevel him.  
  
Hans pulls him down onto the bed—the bed that is not his, and carries the unfamiliar smell of washing day—and they move together, they unlace their trousers, Kristoff takes their cocks in hand and rocks against him as Hans gasps against his neck, nose pressed against the jut of bone behind his ear. This is nothing like his previous encounters, which were light-hearted, _rolls in the hay_ they might have been called. Pleasant distractions. Right now Kristoff feels like an animal, divested of reason, intent on coming. Hans says _oh,_ a soft, high, punched noise; whimpers, mouth on his shoulder, shuddering and stilling. Kristoff ruts against the juncture between groin and thigh, groans in relief.  
  
"I don't know what I'd do without you," Hans says, a hand on the small of his back beneath the covers. Kristoff gets up to stoke the fire.  


* * *

  
The clock chimes at five o'clock in the morning, which is possibly an accident and possibly to motivate unwelcome guests to hurry along. Kristoff would like to think he is not unwelcome, but nevertheless gets up, splashes water on his underarms from a jug kept by the fire, halfheartedly scrapes at his face in the small bathroom mirror. After he has dressed himself he roams the upper rooms searching for Hans, who at some point had gotten up and made his side of the bed. He is doing everything Hans is asking of him, he realizes. Some things he does without having to be asked at all. If Hans asked him to jump, would he say _how high?_  
  
He finds him in the castle chapel, connected to the upstairs by a long passage; it's empty at this hour, and frigid. Hans stands over Anna's serene, uncanny body, holding a candle; devoid of expression, he touches her fingers, hands, hair, as if testing if they will break. It occurs to Kristoff that he doesn't know him very well at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Translation into Italian provided by Lyrtil, here: http://efpfanfic.net/viewstory.php?sid=2510478&i=1! Check it out!


End file.
